Steve Purchase, a dentist, found himself alone with a dental X-ray machine and a Raspberry Pi one evening, so he did the obvious thing. I thought the small images he produced were really interesting, and asked him if he could come up with any higher resolution pictures. He went a bit above and beyond on my request.

I am a dentist, so am using the films I have available in work. I used a large extra-oral film of about 30cm x 15cm for the first images you saw. For these latest images, I have used my best resolution films which are a lot smaller than a Pi, being only 3cm x 4cm. I have stitched together parts from about 16 images to create the master image.

The X-ray machine I used for this is a Trophy CCX 70kV set. The films are re-useable phosphor plates which are scanned into a PC using a DenOptix QST scanner made by a company called Gendex.

As always, you can click on any of these pictures to enlarge them.

These Pis are colourised artificially. The original capture is monochrome:

Different colourisations make different features of the Pi more obvious and easier for the eye to parse: for example, the ball grid array (BGA) assembly of the stacked processor/memory package on package (POP) in the middle of the board is crystal-clear here, with its tiny dots of solder…

…while the image below highlights the maze of tracks in all the layers of the board much more efficiently than the b/w original does.

We’ll be printing some of these off to stick on the walls at Pi Towers. Thank you very much indeed, Steve. More power to your tartar-scraping elbow, and to that sucky thing that you stick under people’s tongues to get rid of all the spit.

About those people on the forum asking for a bespoke Pi. NOTHING STOPS THEM. I get a few emails a week from people who just don’t understand that no, we can’t change the whole manufacturing process just to make 500 variant Pis for them. They also don’t understand that dropping parts would make things more, not less expensive, because of the cost of stopping and reprogramming the line.

To clarify: the “blobby” BGA bits under the CPU/RAM aren’t where the soldering has “gone sloppy” ;-) It’s just that (since this is an Xray) you’re also seeing the capacitors (and their solder) that are mounted to the back of the board. And the “blobbyness” around the edge of the CPU/RAM is because the SoC and RAM use different ball pitches http://www.raspberrypi.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/2012-09-21-10.58.22.jpg

These images remind me of my time identifying faults on the manufacturing line. I was working in one of the first companies to do BGA work in the UK, and was one of 3 qualified to play with operate the x-ray system.
There are times I regret becoming a sysadmin, the hardware stuff was always more fun!

I have an idea?
On some dental scanners the scan runs on an arc scanning the patients teeth. Was wondering if you could take this scan and reconstruct a 3d image. This should be possible as you should be able to describe the arc mathematically and hence using a form of transposition convert the image to a 3d model as is done in 3d modelling. The only concern is how to determine the distances of each point.
Anyway the main reason for this is to generate a 3d model of each tooth so in the event of you loosing one a replacement is fabricated to replace the one the dentist extracts as the tooth stays in the jaw due to the gums and a cacuum.

As Arte Johnson’s Nazi soldier character would say on Rowan and Martin’s 1960s TV show “Laugh-In”, “Vellllly intellesthting!”

Sooooo … I’m guessing that the overvoltage bit has been blown (among other things, like every semiconductor junction) in the Pi by the 70 KeV X-ray stream? What did that poor Pi do to deserve such mistreatment? My Pii are quivering in terror having just been forced to display this Pi porn being passed off as “scientifically valuable and necessary”!

Brilliant images – If it’s OK I would like to print one to go on my home office wall. It will remind me of all those ‘happy’ hours in front of the monitor figuring out how to get all the tracks out from underneath that damn chip (sorry Eben). Love it really ;-)

If you have a greyscale image, it is very easy to do the coloring in any number of different software programs. For example in the open-source “GIMP” program, you first convert the greyscale image to RGB type (if it isn’t already) and then use the Gradient Map filter (“Colors->Map->Gradient Map”) to convert it into a false color image, using the current gradient map setting. You can do a similar thing in Photoshop, for example: http://ficpics.com/basic-gradient-maps-tutorial-for-photoshop/

these are great pictures and glad to see that no PIs were harmed in the process. I would like to make a tee shirt transfer from one as well as hang one on the wall which I assume would be ok? ie. public domain?… thanks!